I, Love, and You

Each of these are passages from the new Avett Brothers Album, which I very much like.

The following are resonating because of recent events and sentiments. I'm pretty much hinging on the fact that most people will not read all of this:

Three words that became hard to say
I and Love and You
What you were then I am today
Look at the things I do
...
I miss that feeling of feeling,
The feeling of feeling...
The wind above my face
And caring what it bring my way,
The minutes pass away
And caring what I do with them, oh--
Maybe bring me love or something else
...
I wanna have friends that I can trust,
that love me for the man I've become not the man I was.
I wanna have friends that will let me be
all alone when being alone is all that I need.
I wanna have pride like my mother has,
And not like the kind in the bible that turns you bad.
...
Close the laundry door,
tiptoe across the floor
Keep your clothes on,
I've got all that I can take.
Teach me how to use,
the love that people say you made.
Break this tired old routine,
and this time dont make me leave
...
Violent is the motion in my heart and in my body and mind
And silent is the feeling that I lost but I'm determined to find
And love is but an ocean, unrealistic notion
But I cling to her devotion and I let it pull me down to the floor
...
Temporary is my time,
Ain't nothing in this world that's mine
Except the will I found to carry on
Free is not your right to chose
It's answering what's asked of you
To give the love you find until it's gone
...
I haven’t finished a thing since I started my life,
I don’t feel much like starting now.
Walking now lonely has worked like a charm
I’m the only one I have to let down.
But watching you makes me think that that is wrong.
I can go on with my insecure nature
I can keep living off sympathy.
I can tell all the people that all that sucks
Has a direct reflection on me.
It's up to you, my father, call on me.

My Heart, It Keeps Me Broke

An excellent song and one of my perpetual favorites by Jars of Clay. I have to fight to not put it on every single playlist I make. This week, it seems particularly pertinent.

"Mirrors and Smoke" by Jars of Clay, from Good Monsters

[resonating lines in bold, hear the song here]

I'm feeling older than my years
I'm feeling pain inside my chest
It's love that keeps me silent
It's my silence that you detest
Rivers flow into the oceans
And oceans never fill
I want to kiss your lips, but I know I never will

Love's a hard decision to risk impending choke
But love will keep you wishing
And my heart will keep me broke

I blew flowers, gave you candy to even out the guilt
I sent you greeting cards with messages
that I could never write
Rivers flow into the oceans
And oceans never fill
I want to let you know me
But I know I never will

Love's a contradiction
Many mirrors and smoke
Love will keep you wishing
My heart will keep me broke

You will always want me
And I'll always want to leave
Even though I cut your wounds
You still deny they're real
Rivers flow into the ocean
Oceans never fill
I want to lay my life down
But I know you never will

Love's a strange condition
With all the doubts it can invoke
You love keeps me wishing
And my heart keeps me broke

Baby, don't you cry, 'cause I got it all figured out
You always make me sad
But that's what true love is all about
Rivers never fill the oceans
But oceans always feel
The waters reaching deep inside them
I guess they always will

Love's a constant mission to a world you never spoke
Love, it keeps you wishing
My heart, it keeps me broke...
Mirrors and Smoke

Maybe it is Me, Maybe it is Her

Dating is hard. (Some may feel obligated to insert their "No Sh*t, Sherlock" here, a point I am perfectly willing to concede). It is harder than I remember.

Then again, since I've really screwed up my relationships since my last "official" relationship. Maybe it's just been a while. Maybe I'm just missing some key component.

Or maybe I'm just growing up. Maybe I feel "out of it" because the "in it" I am used to is from a younger, less mature, more selfish High School T.J. Maybe what used to be the norm is no longer acceptable. Maybe God wants something else for me.

Maybe it's Maybelline?

Whatever the case. I do remember it sucking this bad when it sucked. I do remember the suck.

RUF Barn Dance

..was a lot of fun, as you can see:


This was just half of the awesomeness that transpired, the other half being square dancing. You have no idea. It will literally rock your face off. Face replacements not provided.

TVR In Fall

Over fall break, while many were headed home to enjoy the company of their families, Joel and I turned our faces to mountains, a departed for a weekend-long adventure at TVR.

Let the record show that the reason I did not go home is that my family was away from Charleston and would not be back until Sunday night, therefore leaving me only 1.5 days to possibly be with them.

It was nice to be at camp for the first time since summer. It was definitely later than I usually go up there. I was hoping to get up there sooner, but, alas, Winthrop had different plans for me.

For anyone who is wondering, fall is the most beautiful time of the year at camp. The lush, full greens you experience during the spring and summer were mottled with a lovely assortment of reds, oranges and yellows, as you can see from Plow Point:


In addition to awesome autumn-ness, there was also snow. That's right. While Joel and I were on Plow Point, there was literally snow flurries coming up the mountain, hitting us in the face. That sucked a little.


Also, I got to hit up Alliance for church on Sunday, even though we didn't get to hear Scott Andrews speak because it was their missions festival this past week. Got a chance to talk to him, and he recommended RTS for seminary, said he took some classes there. Pretty sweet, yo.

All in all, a good weekend. It was fun to hang out with everyone and Joel, seeing as the group was only 9 people. Running the top of the tower was cold. Greg was out because of surgery, but he's back now. I am somewhat anxious to get back up there.

Ex Post Facto

I have had the uncomfortable pleasure of being incandescently happy, earnestly hopeful, devout, depressed, irrevocably frustrated and horribly convicted all within the past 18 or so hours.

Things That Would Be Better Left Undone

As I looked down at her lovely, innocent-yearning face, I was overwhelmed with a flood of adoration for the innocence brokenly beheld there. Quiet, sleeping, content with my caress. There is a great sympathy, a pity if you will, that can overcome and coincide with a hardness of heart with such a subtly strong force, it will make you crumble.

Of Perceptive Reality

I think I want to keep a record of all of my stupid, selfish little thoughts not so that I can go back later and see how stupid and selfish I was, but to realize that at that time, my stupidity and selfishness were my reality.

I struggle a lot. Actually, struggle isn't the right word, surrender would be a bit more accurate. But when I do, I always claim that I "don't know" what to do, that I "have tried, but can't" break free from my "spiritual depression." On the one hand, I could have used (and continue to need) people to tell me to quit whining and turn to Jesus, on the other, at those times where I hit the pits of Sheol-esque emotion, those are very real statements.

At those times, my perception is my reality because it is controlling my action. That being said, I can break free from those depths and am learning how to do that each and every day.

I just feel like it would be interesting to see what my perceptive reality is at those times.

Of Resonating Literature

Sometimes literature just resonates with you. It takes your meager circumstances and elevates them or mirrors them in the higher plane of that which you are reading.

"When once he was within the cabin there was nothing to do but kiss. He avoided her mouth—the mouth reveals so much, but she wouldn't be content until she had pulled his face round a left the seal of her return on his lips. 'Oh my dear, here I am.'

'Here you are,' he said

...

Did my lies really start, he wondered, when I wrote that letter? Can I really love her more than Louise? Do I, in my heart of hearts, love either of them, or is it only that this automatic pity goes out to any human need—and makes it worse? Any victim demands allegiance.

...

'Missing Mass on Sunday's a mortal sin, just as much as adultery.'

'Adultery's more fun,' he said with attempted lightness.

...

...he felt his whole personality crumble with the disintegration of lies.

...

'Why do we go on like this—being unhappy?'

'It's a mistake to mix up the ideas of happiness and love,' Scobie said with desperate pedantry, as though, if he could turn the whole situation into a textbook case, as they had turned Pemberton, peace might return to both of them, a kind of resignation.

...

One ought not to lie to two people if it could be avoided—that way lay complete chaos, but he was tempted terribly to lie as he watched her face on the pillow. She seemed to him like one of those plants in nature films which you watch age under your eye.

...

'But I simply don't understand. If you believe in hell, why are you with me now?'

How often he though, lack of faith helps one to see more clearly than faith. He said, 'You are right, of course: it ought to prevent all this. But the villages on the slopes of Vesuvius go on...And then, against all the teaching of the Church, one has the conviction that love—any kind of love—does deserve a bit of mercy. One will pay, of course, pay terribly, but I don't believe on will pay for ever.

...

'I can regret the lies, the mess, the unhappiness, but if I were dying now I wouldn't know how to repent the love.'

...

'It's not much good confessing if I don't intend to try. . . .'

'Well then,' she said triumphantly, 'be hung for a sheep. You are in—what do you call it—mortal sin? now. What difference does it make?'

He thought: pious people, I suppose, would call this the devil speaking, but he knew that evil never spoke in these crude answerable terms: this was innocence."

From Book III, Part I, Chapter I of Graham Greene's novel The Heart of the Matter. Read. Buy.

Of Broken Arms Pt. II

I'll begin with the explanation. I was not at TVR the week that it happened, but at a Group Workcamp in Lexington, NC, which is supposedly the barbecue capital, but the general consensus of the group was that good ole SC barbecue is easily better. The town did feature a number of cast iron pigs, in different poses and painted, which was quite entertaining.

Well, on Thursday afternoon of the week, I was playing a game of Ultimate Frisbee with some people from the camp and from my youth group. Maybe 15 minutes into us playing, I collided with my brother as we were both going for a pass. Here is a basic diagram of what happened, with a few adjustments:



As you can see, I was running one way and my brother was running in the other direction, in the air after a jump. Unfortunately, my arm was between us when I was unable to move out of the way. And because I was only wearing a shield on my right arm, just like the picture, well:

Boom pop crack wallakazaam. You saw the picture.

Of Broken Arms

I broke my arm. It's taking me dang long to write this post with one hand. For this reason my posts this summer are probably going to happen hardly at all. Sorry. I know you are all greatly disappointed.

Here's a picture of the injury in the hospital, before it was set:

Of Mass Assaults

31

Judging from my experience as a daycare and summer camp counselor, I think it's an accurate number. Speaking of attacks:

59%

As much as it disappoints me, I also think this one is accurate. You can only defeat so many zombies when you don't have guns (even though blades don't need reloading) and when you have some moral sense or desire to save your friends and family.

Of Aces

I know only about half of you care, but I just had to put it down somewhere that today, the 24 of May, in the year of our Lord 2009, I successfully completed a disc golf hole in one (1) shot.

That's right, son! I got a hole-in-one! I was playing Park Circle down here in Chucktown with my pastor, his son, my brother and another friend, so there were witnesses. It was only a 248 foot hole, but still...

I was dang excited too, I always thought it was a little silly when people got so pumped after an ace, but I must say that when you do ace a hole, it's an adrenaline rush. My throat was already hurting, but I think I threw my voice out from screaming "YEAH! YES!" at the top of my lungs several times.

Park Circle Hole #15, aced.

Overnight Hammocking

Last night my friend Andy and I slept in our hammocks instead of our dorm rooms. I'm not gonna lie, it was pretty dang cool. However, I must qualify it's dang coolness.

First, it is very difficult to sleep in a hammock, as it is not flat like a bed. That problem will hopefully be remedied next time we do it, with a little adjustment of the hanging technique.

Second, people are ridiculous. First, at about 2 AM, there was a group of 5-7 seemingly intoxicated people that came out to the pod-living structures near where we hung our hammocks, and proceeding to be ri-dang-diculously loud and obnoxious. Also, at a approximately 4 or 5 AM, two people came over and something along the lines of the following:

"Hmm, I wonder what these are?"
"I think they're hammocks."
"Yeah, it looks like that's what they are."

At which point one of them proceeded to lean down on Andy's hammock, which he had drawn over himself and was therefore not visible, to which he replied "Who's there!?"

"Oh F*CK! There's f*ckin' people in these hammocks!"

Which of course was very conducive to sleeping.

Overall, it was good though. Out of the 6 hours we were out there, I slept probably 5. Next time, though, armed with better technique and hopefully a better location, we should be solid for the whole night.

Unlying Pixels

I have found that I can tell myself and really believe that I am 100% okay with something, but as soon as I see a picture confirming it, it makes my stomach turn.

Something about seeing the truth in unlying pixels incites an intense physio-emotional response that leaves me shocked at both what I saw and how I reacted.

I think it's very interesting that this happens. It has happened to me several times before. Maybe it's just part of the acceptance process.

I will have to spend some serious time in prayer over this. It is annoying how almost as soon as I have obtained some semblance of peace, something decides to come along and push me off the stool.

Ambiguity abounds, I know.

A Small Part of the Body

You know how sometimes the Holy Spirit will speak to us and tell us to say something to someone that will speak to them where they're at in their life right now, with a positive impact, because it was just what they need to hear.?

Well, I think that I have the ability to say something to someone that will speak to them where they're at in their life right now, and effectively hurt them because whatever I said was just the right stupid thing they didn't need to hear.

I like to think of myself as a very quick witted, funny guy.

Well tonight, my quick wit got me into a not so fun situation where I hurt someone I care deeply for. Yeah, go ahead and slap me please.

"How great a forest is set ablaze by such a small fire! And the tongue is a fire, a world of unrighteousness." [James 3:5-6]

In Conclusion

This spring break has been an almost complete waste of time.

I have done next to nothing productive, with the exception of writing a letter and reading maybe a few pages of meaningful material.

Other than that, the few times I've spent with friends have made this week feel only slightly less than a waste.

Over 7 daggum days and nothing done. Not even a good amount of rest.

Now I've got a headache.

And I've no one to blame but myself.

The Despair of Unbelief

"Our minds, which are even now only just awakening after years of materialism, are infected with the despair of unbelief. The nightmare of materialism, which has turned the life of the universe into an evil, useless game, is not yet past; it holds the awakening soul in it's grasp."
--Wassily Kandinsky

I have come to the realization that I am the owner of a hardened heart. And not in the "Oh yes, T.J., everyone has a hardened heart" sense, I'm realizing it's more along the lines of the "God gave them over to their sins," nigh on unrepentant hardened heart. Essentially what this means is that I need to stop making excuses and start loving Jesus.

I have fallen into the same cycle of ridiculous actions, all the direct results of my like of belief:

• I do not pray, because I do not believe that my prayer will be effective.
• I do not love, because I do not believe that God loves me.
• I do not show grace, because I do not believe that I need God's grace.
• I do not follow God [and in turn follow various, numerous idols] because I do not believe that God will satisfy my every need.

I am reminded of a quote by Jonathan Edwards: "There must be a direct and immediate sense of God's glory and excellency. I say direct and immediate, to distinguish it from a mere perception that God is glorious and excellent by means of speculative and distant argumentation, which is a more indirect way of apprehending things."

This is where my belief fails. I have a "mere perception" of all of the above things, I have speculated and participated in "distant argumentation" of each of these things, but none of them are real to me. Just as if I was arguing that Britain exists...sure, there's a logical progression to arrive at that conclusion, but I've never experienced it, which limits my belief.

I look at what I thought I believed for all these years, what I thought I had 'down pat,' and wonder, like the older prodigal son, why I don't get to experience the grandeur that my brother does. Forgetting, ridiculously, that I have always had access to the Father and his blessings.

So now, the Father has extended his invitation to come into the 'party,' into his blessings, into his glory...what will I do?

The Love of My Life

I went to see a dance performance tonight, not normally my cup of tea, but it was amazing. As a poet, I highly appreciated the artistry and metaphor and symbolism it contained. Quite amazing.

Now, as result of noticing the above qualities, and the simple fact that I look for and normally find metaphor and poetry in just about everything, I came to the conclusion that the love of my life, or just about anyone I was to love romantically for a long period of time, would have to be able to do something similar.

Either she would need to be able to recognize it herself, just like I do, or she would have to at least genuinely appreciate it whenever I got excited about it. I find myself often, repeatedly, perpetually echoing the desire of the speaker in The Postal Service's song "Clark Gable":

"I want so badly to believe that 'there is truth, that love is real,' and I want life in every word to the extent that it's absurd."

That is literally what I want. Life in every word. And some people may think it's absurd. But I don't. And I think that the love of my life will have to be the same way.

Now, I am by no means trying to "limit God's choice" or any such nonsense. For all I know, God may have someone picked out for me who hates literature/poetry/art. I'm just saying that the likelihood of that being the case is not very grand in my mind.

Mayhaps she will not agree, per sé, or she will not do it herself, but I feel as though she would at least have to appreciate the quality in myself and be willing to listen and celebrate it whenever I have a poetic outburst.

Hemp Bracelet

I have been wearing this bracelet since January 13, 2008. It was originally a gift from someone who, at the time, was a good friend. While I did not really appreciate it when I first received it, at least not beyond the merit of a gift from this person I cared about. I would never have anticipated the worth it has to me now.

Why, one may ask, does this probably no more than five dollar piece of woven hemp have such value, especially when you are no long friends with the person who gave it? To tell the truth, I do not rightly know why it means so much to me.

At the time it was given, and for a good while thereafter, I really cared for the person who gave it to me. The affection I bestowed upon her was, for at least a while, one of the first times I was genuinely and unselfishly affectionate toward someone. But the significance of this bracelet goes beyond just how much I cared for her.

You see, after a while, my genuine, unselfish affection became not so genuine and selfless. It is amazing how a simple holding of hands or snuggle session can radically alter the dynamics of a relationship. At this point in our not so happy tale is where I am quite ashamed of the way I acted toward this once good friend of mine.

We had a 'falling out' of sorts, and went from talking nearly every day on the phone, writing letters nearly every week, poking each other on Facebook at nearly every opportunity, to a complete lack of interaction. Absolute silence between us. Again, my blame in this matter would be difficult to overstate.

The proverbial nail in the coffin occurred when an action of mine that will go unmentioned here had the understandable affect of deeply hurting this young woman for whom I cared so much at one time.

Approximately a month and a half later, I was very frustrated with the silence between us. I was downright pissed about it. It was about this point that I was perusing through the letters and gifts I had received from her, when I came upon this bracelet. I wore it once or twice, almost in spite, to show that my attitude was the better of the two.

I wore it for a week or so, nonchalantly. Then, on January 13th, while in the shower, where I used to do a lot of my thinking, it struck me that God called me to love everyone, regardless of their actions toward me. I realized that not only had I failed to really love her in the month leading up to our falling out, but I had also ceased to love her since then.

It was at that point that I put on the bracelet, with the intent to not take it off, as a remind that I am called to love everyone, in spite of their hate, failings, annoyingness, personality flaws, bad jokes, stupid opinions and even unresponsiveness to me.

I wear it all the time, in the shower, in the rain, to church, to class, playing sports, whatever I am doing. It has not left my body since January 13th, 2008. While it does not always serve its purpose of reminding me to love others at all times, and sometimes it does, I just don't, I will continue to wear it with the hope that there is hope for a person like me to learn to love.

That is why I wear my hemp bracelet all the time.